Oberon Books, 2004

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Scenes: 29, Roles: Total (67), Female (25), Male (42), Unassigned (0)

...A New Testament informed by the turmoil of the twentieth century, The Ecstatic Bible is a series of interlocking narratives based around the 100-year courtship of a faithless priest and a woman whose decision to abandon free...

Oberon Books, 2004

Oberon Modern Plays

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Roles: Total (3), Female (1), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...A young man rushes to reach the bedside of his dying father, but arrives too late. His younger brother was present at the death, but his attitude is strangely ambiguous, and the elder brother becomes suspicious. The intentions of the dead...

Oberon Books, 2005

Oberon Modern Plays

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Scenes: 16, Roles: Total (10), Female (5), Male (4), Unassigned (1)

...The Fence in its Thousandth Year was inspired by the long distance fence whilst it was under construction in the Gaza to separate the Palestinian and Jewish communities. Set in a world of rising frontiers and illegal...

Oberon Books, 2006

Oberon Modern Plays

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Scenes: 21, Roles: Total (7), Female (3), Male (4), Unassigned (0)

...Barker's abiding interest in interrogating the great classics for their 'silences' is shown in Gertrude - The Cry, his re-writing of the Hamlet story. Scarcely examined in Shakespeare, the passion of Gertrude for Claudius is made the centre...

Oberon Books, 2006

Oberon Modern Plays

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Scenes: 13

...13 Objects movingly reveals the investment we make in inanimate things, their power to unsettle us, and how their talismanic qualities license new ways of seeing the world. Howard Barker is one of the most significant...

Oberon Books, 2006

Oberon Modern Plays

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Scenes: 12, Roles: Total (15), Female (5), Male (10), Unassigned (0)

...Set at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the English Reformation, The Seduction of Almighty God describes the spiritual ascendancy of an adolescent priest and the apalling discovery that he possesses the power of life...

Oberon Books, 2006

Oberon Modern Plays

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Scenes: 23, Roles: Total (21), Female (6), Male (15), Unassigned (0)

...Animals in Paradise was commissioned by the Swedish and Danish governments to celebrate their connection by bridge, a symbolic finish to centuries of antagonism. Barker's unexpected treatment of the theme provoked unrest on its first...

Oberon Books, 2006

Oberon Modern Plays

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Acts: 2, Scenes: 11, Roles: Total (15), Female (4), Male (11), Unassigned (0)

...The Castle is set at the end of Crusades and describes the clashes that occur when returning soldiers bring an Arab architect home with them as a prisoner. Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial...

Oberon Books, 2006

Oberon Modern Plays

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Acts: 2, Scenes: 12, Roles: Total (33), Female (11), Male (20), Unassigned (2)

...The Europeans takes one of the great eruptions of Islamic imperialism as the background for a young woman's insistence on her right to her own identity. Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists...

Oberon Books, 2006

Oberon Modern Plays

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Scenes: 20, Roles: Total (21), Female (3), Male (14), Unassigned (4)

...Scenes from an Execution shows the struggle of an independently-minded artist against the power of the Venetian state. Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge...

Oberon Books, 2006

Oberon Modern Plays

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Scenes: 10, Roles: Total (38), Female (15), Male (21), Unassigned (2)

...The Possibilities, a disturbing series of short plays set in various times and cultures, reveals Barker's unconventional way with moral dilemmas. Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his...

Oberon Books, 2006

Oberon Modern Plays

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Acts: 3, Scenes: 10, Roles: Total (36), Female (10), Male (26), Unassigned (0)

...Victory is set in the English Civil War and follows the ethical voyage of a widow towards personal reconstruction. Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge...

Oberon Books, 2008

Oberon Modern Plays

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Acts: 3, Scenes: 10, Roles: Total (14), Female (5), Male (9), Unassigned (0)

...The plays in this volume range over twenty years, beginning with Barker's first major work for the stage, Claw, a study of urban discontent and political impotence, developed over three stylistically contrasting acts. Its terrible...

Oberon Books, 2008

Oberon Modern Plays

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Roles: Total (2), Female (0), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...A critical moment in social decay is at the centre of The Dying of Today, in which a stranger who luxuriates in the telling of bad news observes the effects of his devastating narrative on a humble barber. The barber's recovery from pain...

Oberon Books, 2008

Oberon Modern Plays

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Acts: 2, Scenes: 33, Roles: Total (9), Female (3), Male (6), Unassigned (0)

...Barker's most experimental work in form and content is probably Found in the Ground, a mobile, musical work set during the last days of an aged Nuremberg judge whose baying hounds and burning library form an uncanny background to his...

Oberon Books, 2008

Oberon Modern Plays

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Acts: 3, Scenes: 13, Roles: Total (13), Female (3), Male (10), Unassigned (0)

...The body as a site of political and personal investment is also at the heart of The Love of a Good Man, an early work set on the empty battlefields of the Great War, where the burial of the dead becomes a pretext for private ambition...

Oberon Books, 2008

Oberon Modern Plays

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Roles: Total (12), Female (3), Male (7), Unassigned (2)

...Barker's scrutiny of the body and its complex meanings is never more intense than in He Stumbled, the tragedy of a celebrated anatomist whose last dissection becomes his own...

Oberon Books, 2008

Oberon Modern Plays

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Scenes: 12, Roles: Total (3), Female (1), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...The contradictions of the humanist personality are explored in The Road, the House, the Road. Erasmus' obscure colleague Aventinus was found dead on a wintry road. How he arrived at his solitary death forms the subject of this speculation...

Oberon Books, 2008

Oberon Modern Plays

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Acts: 3, Roles: Total (8), Female (5), Male (3), Unassigned (0)

...In I Saw Myself a woman's longing to understand her compulsion to transgress the laws of her society comes into collision with the conventions of an art form. In the weaving of a tapestry, Barker's thirteenth century heroine privileges...

Oberon Books, 2008

Oberon Modern Plays

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Acts: 5, Scenes: 15, Roles: Total (12), Female (11), Male (1), Unassigned (0)

...In Ursula Barker's engagement with the pains of the past, and his way of reinvigorating ancient arguments reaches a high point in his treatment of the legend of St Ursula and the martyrdom of 11,000 virgins, where the virtues of celibacy...